Now for the latest entry in the most unexpected saga: Worms 68K for the TI-89. 22 years in the making, lol.

You can find the project's source code and build on GitHub:

Below: the story so far...

In 2004 I was a young programmer, and I cut my teeth with TI-basic and C on graphing calculators. I started programming a Worms clone, inspired by another game by Jean-Christophe Budin.

I got many features built, but I hit the 65k limit and ran out of space. Nevertheless, I published what I had anyway on my personal site.

In 2017, Lionel Debroux found my post and reached out to me with some optimizations he found in my code, saving up to 6k bytes, and suggested I might be able to finish. I looked at my atrocious code from 2004, and with an extra 13 years of experience, I decided I could just do a scratch rewrite in a few weeks.

I ended up building a rock-solid foundation, but it had 1 bug that stumped me: moving the camera would cause a crash. At the same time, my renewed interest in low-level C programming led me to learn how to write GameBoy/Color, GameGear/SMS, and SegaGenesis roms. I ultimately got distracted, burned out, and demoralized from the camera bug.

Recently I've been using AI a lot as a coding utility, specifically Gemini, and it's been great. Something reminded me of the 2017 remake, and I decided to see if AI could find the bug. It did. In like 30 seconds, lol.

I decided to read my 2017 code base, and it was perfect. After I wrapped up my holiday projects this past December, I decided to put some time in on this project, to see how much further I could take it.

I added tons of stuff and promptly ran out of space again, so I dusted off my 9-year-old email thread with Lionel, and he replied! He then found me like 10k more bytes to work with.

I sprinted towards the end and managed to not only finish, but add even more features than I had originally intended.

Then I decided to randomly go hard and make a ridiculously overproduced trailer for a calculator game, lol. I used Blender for the animations, VTI/OBS for the screen capture, and DaVinci Resolve for editing.

The end of the trailer says "Q1 2026". I am not ready to release it yet, though if you google it, I'm sure you can find the source. The game still has a few bugs and details to polish, but in the immediate near term I need to take a break, and I need to work on other things (Like finding a job, for starters).

I decided Q1 would give me almost 3 months lead time to get back to this & ship, so stay tuned for the official release someday. Or maybe I'll forget and update this post in 10 years. Who knows?

Worms 68k 2026